I’m reading The Story of English in 100 Words. I haven’t finished it yet, so I don’t feel qualified to remark on the success or failure of such an ambitious project, but it includes a fun little list of collective nouns which I will partly reproduce here for your pleasure:
- an absence of waiters
- a rash of dermatologists
- a clutch of mechanics
- a lot of auctioneers
- a mass of priests
But of course the fun thing about collective nouns is that you can invent your own. For example:
- a bleat of tweets
- a hop of IPAs
- a mite of possibilities
- a hamper of cables (anyone who’s ever tried to walk across one of our cable-strewn floors without tripping would understand this one immediately)
Others?